The Evidence from Church History
By Dr. Robert Sungenis · 2023 · ISBN 978-1-939856-58-6
Third of the three volumes, and the one that leaves the laboratory for the archive. Sungenis wrote this one alone. It makes the scriptural, patristic and ecclesiastical case: what the Bible says about a stationary Earth, what the Fathers understood it to mean, what the Church actually decided, and what has been said since.
Chapter 14 takes the passages one at a time, beginning with Joshua 10:10-14 and Galileo's own reading of it, and works from the distinction between language of fact and language of appearance. Chapter 15 gathers the consensus of the Fathers on geocentrism, the length of the Genesis day, the firmament and the sphericity of the Earth. Chapter 16 is the long institutional record: Pius V and the Catechism of the Council of Trent, Foscarini in 1615, the proceedings of 1616 and the trial of 1633, Alexander VII's bull Speculatores Domus Israel, the indexes of Benedict XIV and Gregory XVI, Canon Giuseppe Settele's imprimatur, Providentissimus Deus, Vatican I and Vatican II, and John Paul II's reexamination of the case, with the question of whether the papal decrees of 1616 to 1664 bind. The last chapter reads Genesis 1 and its geocentric implications, answering Hugh Ross, Raymond Brown, Stanley Jaki and Ferdinand Crombette.